This post is intriguing for a couple reasons: it’s a useful review of key themes in Clay Shirky’s latest book, and it’s also an example of how Kindle annotations could be used to build a detailed book summary/review (I don’t know if Bruce Eckel actually used a Kindle to collect the ~60 annotations listed in the review, but he easily could have, using the Amazon Kindle site)
The book is basically a followup to Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, which said (to me, anyway): The hierarchy was created primarily for communication. Now that we have much better electronic communication, we need much less hierarchy -- in many cases, no hierarchy at all.
Both books show Shirky's deep insights into the impact of the internet, and are written in his direct and pithy style, always thought provoking. I recommend reading both.
Here are my highlighted passages from the book, as bullet points, with my own comments interspersed. I didn't highlight a lot because it was all good, so I looked for what really stood out.
See Bruce Eckel’s full review for his annotated annotations (highlights etc.).
A screen clip of my Amazon Kindle page for the book follows below; now I just need to be as disciplined as Bruce Eckel, and do more post-processing/annotation harvesting and sharing…